3 white officers in SC indicted in 3 cases of shooting unarmed black men

Posted: Dec 05, 2014 7:32 PM PST

COLUMBIA, SC -By Robert Kittle

While the nation has seen protests over grand juries not indicting white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York, the situation is much different in South Carolina. There have been three indictments in the last four months of white officers charged with shooting unarmed black men in three different cases.

This week, a grand jury indicted former Eutawville police chief Richard Combs for the 2011 shooting death of Bernard Bailey. Former state trooper Sean Groubert is facing a felony charge of assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature for shooting an unarmed black man who was reaching into his car to get his wallet in September. And in August, a North Augusta officer was charged with misconduct in office for the shooting death of a 68-year-old unarmed black man at his home after a chase.

Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies policing, regulations, and training, and is a former police officer himself, says, "What we're seeing this year might not have happened last year. We might not have seen those indictments last year, but it's because we're having a renewed social focus on police actions and officer accountability."

Combs' attorney says he thinks the only reason his client was indicted is because of all the attention the cases in Ferguson and New York are getting, especially since the Eutawville shooting happened in 2011 and the indictment just came down Wednesday.

Bailey had gone to Eutawville's Town Hall to dispute a ticket his daughter was given for a broken tail light. He and Combs argued. Combs had gotten an arrest warrant for Bailey because of an argument the two had before over the same issue, so as Bailey got into his truck to try to leave, Combs reached in to try to turn off the ignition to prevent him from driving off.

The men fought, and Combs says he shot Bailey because he was afraid for his life, since his arm was stuck in the steering wheel and Bailey was going to drive off.

Stoughton says all of the shooting incidents, and the chokehold that killed Eric Garner in New York, show that police training needs to be changed.

"Police are trained to focus on the severity of the risks that every encounter and every individual present, the possibility that someone will pull out a gun or a knife or attack them violently,” he says. “But they're not trained about how rare that actually is. Those types of assaults are vanishingly rare when you consider the massive number of police interactions every year.

Out of about 63 million interactions in which a police officer is encountering a civilian, very few, relatively few result in an attack on an officer. Much fewer result in any injury--not even serious injury but any injury to an officer--and far, far fewer result in an officer being feloniously killed in the line of duty."

He says officers are trained that the first rule of law enforcement is to come home at the end of your shift, so they're taught not to take risks or allow a threat to materialize. That means they have to act without hesitation, because sometimes waiting until they have more information may be too late. But he says officers get an exaggerated idea of how frequently they'll face those risks.

 http://www.wbtw.com/story/27562124/3...rmed-black-men